Adventures in Baseball Archeology: the Negro Leagues, Latin American baseball, J-ball, the minors, the 19th century, and other hidden, overlooked, or unknown corners of baseball history...with occasional forays into other sports.

chicago american giants

October 16, 2016

A few years ago I wrote about a silent film called As the World Rolls On (1921), a Jack Johnson vehicle that featured footage of actual Negro league baseball games as an integral part of its plot. I didn’t realize it then, but there’s actually an earlier film about black professional baseball.

In 1910 William D. Foster (no relation to Rube Foster), a sportswriter and theatrical agent who wrote for the Chicago Defender under the name Juli Jones, Jr., founded the Foster Film Company (also known as the Foster Photoplay Company). Based in Chicago, it is commonly recognized as the first African-American-owned film company. In 1913 Foster directed The Railroad Porter, the first film with an all-black cast and director.

The following year Foster turned his attention to baseball, and produced a newsreel called The Colored Championship Baseball Game. The subject matter was the recent series between the Chicago American Giants and the Brooklyn Royal Giants, played from August 30 through September 7, 1914, in Chicago’s Schorling Park, and advertised as the “world’s negro championship series.”

I don’t know how long the series was originally scheduled to go, or if it was even a “best of” series or (more likely) just a set number of games that got christened a “championship series” for publicity purposes. In any event, it was not a contest. The Royal Giants suffered through 20 consecutive scoreless innings to start the series, and their bats never did get going, as Rube Foster’s pitchers held them to 12 runs in seven games (with Foster himself contributing a 4-to-2 win in game 4). The American Giants swept the Royals 7 games to none, by a collective score of 32 to 12.

From the title, it appears that William Foster’s film only showed one game, though there’s no way to know which one it could be. Possibly one of the two Sunday games (August 30 and September 6), which had big crowds, or maybe the contest on September 2, the day Rube Foster himself took the mound. Here’s the only contemporary description of the film I found, by Sylvester Russell in the Indianapolis Freeman (September 12, 1914, p. 5):

This is one of the most enticing prospects a Negro league historian will ever encounter: the possibility of in-game footage of players like Pete Hill, John Henry Lloyd, and Bill Monroe of the American Giants, or Charlie Earle, Jules Thomas, or the submarine thrower Dizzy Dismukes of the Royals.

Unfortunately, like As the World Rolls On and the film of the St. Louis Giants’ 1919 opening day, The Colored Baseball Championship Game almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore. Fully 75 percent of feature silent films released by major studios from 1914 to 1929 are lost. The figures for non-feature films (educational films, newsreels, documentaries, short films) must be even worse.

But who knows? Maybe somewhere, in some dusty archive, footage of Rube Foster and his American Giants squaring off against the Brooklyn Royal Giants survives.

The 1914 Chicago American Giants

UPDATE 11:28 pm: Added the Freeman passage from 1914, which I had accidentally left out.

May 1, 2013

Archivists at the University of Georgia have uncovered what seems to be the earliest known footage of African Americans playing baseball, dating from 1917. It’s not professional or even semi-professional, but rather a game between two plantation teams in rural Georgia.

There are at least a couple of examples of actual Negro league teams being filmed around this time. As I wrote a couple of years ago, on opening day at Giants Park in St. Louis in 1919, there were plans to film a game between the St. Louis Giants and the Mexico (Mo.) Grays, a white semipro team. Although the game was rained out, it was played the next day (May 12, 1919). If this film was shot, it hasn’t surfaced anywhere, so far as I can tell.

But even more intriguing than the Georgia film or the possible St. Louis Giants footage is another film project that came to fruition in 1921.

In April of that year, the news emerged that former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson had agreed to make a movie for the Kansas City-based Andlauer Film Company:

(Kansas City Star, April 3, 1921, p. 20)

Although the Andlauer Company is often said to have been black-owned, that seems not to have been the case. Founded by William Anthony “Billy” Andlauer, a (white) movie theater manager, photographer, and filmmaker, the company would become best-known for industrial, technical, and educational films of mostly local interest. The Jack Johnson project may well have been the studio’s only foray into black-cast films for black audiences, at least as far as I’ve seen. It was originally called The Heart of Jack Johnson, but was later retitled As the World Rolls On.

The New York Times article above refers to the film, saying that it contained “footage of an all-black Kansas team in the background.” In fact, As the World Rolls On featured footage of actual NNL games involving the Kansas City Monarchs, Detroit Stars, and Chicago American Giants. The games are integrated into the plot, and Negro league players, notably Sam Crawford, Bruce Petway, and Cristóbal Torriente, had roles in the film.

As the World Rolls On was extremely ambitious, especially for a race film at the time. A detailed plot summary appeared in the Chicago Defender (August 20, 1921, p. 7). An “industrious youth” named Joe Walker, who is “subject to sudden heart attacks,” vies for the hand of Molly, loyal assistant to the respected physician Dr. Saunders. His romantic rival is the vicious bully Tom Atkins, who leads a gang of hooligans and enjoys beating up on the “weaker, smaller” Joe. During one such beatdown, the former heavyweight champ Jack Johnson just happens to be nearby, taking his two nieces for a walk and lecturing them on frontier history in front of the Cyrus E. Dallin statue The Scout, in Kansas City’s Penn Valley Park.

Johnson, hearing the disturbance, rushes to help Joe. He easily dispatches the assailants—being Jack Johnson and all—and leaves them “all stretched out motionless on the ground, due to the whipping Johnson has given them.” There follows a Karate Kid sequence in which Johnson takes on Joe Walker as his protégé and sparring partner. He gets Joe to quit smoking and teaches him “physical and breathing exercises.” In the course of all this the ex-champ “displays his powerful superhuman strength and scientific boxing ability.” Joe, meanwhile, “becomes a healthy man and an athlete.”

And now baseball enters the picture:

“About this time the National Colored League baseball games are in progress at the ball park. In a game between the Kansas City Monarchs and the Detroit Stars (actual scenes) Sam Crawford, captain of the Monarchs, sprains his arm and finds himself in a tight place owing to illness and injuries to his pitching staff. He does not know how the game can be completed without a pitcher. Accidentally glancing in one of the boxes, to his pleasant surprise he sees Joe with Molly. Knowing Joe’s ability as an amateur pitcher, he appeals to Joe to finish the game. Joe agrees, puts on a uniform, pitches a wonderful game and knocks a home run in the ninth inning which wins the game.

“The Elks’ lodge of which Joe is a member is so enthusiastic over Joe’s triumph that the members invite him as the honored guest to a reception given the following Sunday at the ball park. The Chicago Giants are the Monarchs’ opponents (actual scenes). During this reception Nelson Crews, editor of the leading Colored publication, presents the Monarch players with silver monogramed [sic] buckles and belts on behalf of the Elks.”

Nelson Crews was the editor of the Kansas City Sun; it’s actually Rube Foster’s American Giants, not Joe Green’s Chicago Giants, who appear in the film. The plot continues with romance, conspiracy, a trial scene, gunfire, and more fighting before Joe finally vanquishes Tom and marries Molly. Jack Johnson provides his blessing and a thousand-dollar check for the newlyweds.

A piece in the Baltimore Afro-American (December 9, 1921, p. 5) provides a little more information about the film’s baseball content:

“This picture was made by W. A. Andlauer in Kansas City early in September of this year. Besides an all-star cast of colored actors, Johnson is supported by the famous Negro big league teams with Rube Foster and his Chicago Giants, Sam Crawford and his Kansas City Monarchs, and the Detroit Stars.”

Along with Jack Johnson, Blanche Thompson (Molly), and Reed Thomas (Joe Walker), cast listings also include Sam Crawford, Bruce Petway, Rube Foster, and “Torrientti”—Cristóbal Torriente, touted as “the Black Babe Ruth” in one ad for the movie—all playing themselves.

We can narrow down the possibilities for which games feature in the film. It so happens that both the Detroit Stars and the Chicago American Giants visited Kansas City only once in 1921. The Stars played a five-game series there, starting on July 23. The Monarchs swept the series, with Sam Crawford securing complete-game victories in the first game (a 5 to 1 win on July 23) and the last (5 to 2 on July 26). Since the plot involves Crawford pitching, it seems like a good bet that footage was shot in one or both of those games.

The American Giants played six games in Kansas City from September 3 through September 8, taking four of them.

According to sources at the UCLA Special Collections Library, “following the film’s early showings, Andlauer added 500 feet of baseball footage and ‘made one reel all baseball and parades taking all of the shots pertaining to players and parades out of the story’ to make a one-reel supplement. Andlauer wrote, ‘This makes the action better and we know improves the film’.”

(New York Age, September 10, 1921)

As the World Rolls On was released on September 10, 1921, and played all over the country, including New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Richmond, Baltimore, Louisville, Dallas, and Philadelphia, well into 1922. Oddly enough, it was apparently never shown in Chicago, despite the appearance of Rube Foster and the American Giants.

Today, as far as I’m aware, there are no extant prints of As the World Rolls On, which is an enormous shame. From a baseball perspective, this was an astonishing document of Negro league history, a real treasure. What wouldn’t you give to see actual footage of these teams—not mention watch Sam Crawford, Rube Foster, or Bruce Petway act in a movie?

I was able to find one final clue that might be useful to anyone trying to track down a copy of the film. In November 1923, Andlauer Film Productions placed an ad in the Chicago Defender trying to sell three prints of the film, along with title cards and other materials (it was a silent film, of course), for $850.

(Chicago Defender, November 24, 1923, p. 6)

UPDATE 3:26 pm I created a separate page with the entire plot summary of As the World Rolls On from the Chicago Defender (August 20, 1921, p. 7).

August 8, 2011

Here, in a wonderfully high-res scan from Robert Edward Auctions, is a panoramic photograph of a 1923 Chicago American Giants-Kansas City Monarchs game at Schorling Park.

(click to enlarge)

You will recognize this photograph from one of my posts a couple of years ago—it appeared, with the same captions and insets (the box with the series scores on the left, the photo of Rube Foster on the right), in a 1925 book edited by John Taitt called Souvenir of Negro Progress: Chicago, 1779-1925, and can be found (in a lower-res version) at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

Contrary to the description on the auction page, the Negro National League did not hold playoffs between the top two teams from 1920 through 1923. The pennant winner was simply the team with the best record at the end of the season. So this game was not part of a championship series. It was, in fact, a normal regular-season contest, held on Sunday, May 27, 1923, with over 17,000 in attendance. It was so crowded they put up temporary grandstands—one of which, holding 1500 people, collapsed at the end of the seventh inning. Amazingly only 28 people suffered serious injuries, and the game was resumed.

(Chicago Daily Tribune, May 28, 1923, page 3)

It was a “great game,” as the Defender said; here’s the box score and play-by-play, if you want to check it out.

(Chicago Defender, June 2, 1923, page 10)

This was game 2 of a four-game sweep by the American Giants that put them in first place. These were the dates of the games:

May 26: American Giants 3, Monarchs 2

May 27: American Giants 5, Monarchs 4

May 28: American Giants 3 (or 6; see below), Monarchs 2

May 29: American Giants 7, Monarchs 4

The score of game 3 is listed in the box on the left side of the photograph as 3-2 American Giants. The Chicago Defender agreed, printing a box score that showed it finishing 3-2. The Chicago Tribune, however, gave the score as 6-2 Chicago. Which score was correct?

Both, it turns out, depending on which rule you apply about walk-off home runs. With the bases loaded, two out, and the score tied 2-2 in the bottom of the tenth, the Giants’ Harry Kenyon smashed a grand slam home run over the center field fence. By the rule that pertained in the major leagues prior to 1920, teams that won in the bottom of the last inning could only win by one run. So a batter who struck a game-winning hit was only awarded the hit necessary to get the winning run over the plate. In Kenyon’s case, the Giants only needed one run to win, so under this rule he would be credited only with a single, enough to get Cristóbal Torriente from third to home.

Even though that rule had been eliminated by the major leagues in 1920, the Chicago Defender applied it to the May 28 game, and credited Kenyon only with the single (and only Torriente with the first run scored in the inning), giving the score as 3 to 2. The Tribune, however, applied the rule in its modern form, and credited Kenyon with his home run, gave runs scored to Jim Brown, John Beckwith, and Kenyon, and put the score at 6 to 2.

July 27, 2010

Ron Hill told me today that the Hall of Fame is changing Pete Hill’s plaque to reflect his correct full name. Not only that, but they will be holding a special ceremony on Pete’s birthday, October 12, to re-commemorate his election to the Hall.

April 16, 2010

Kevin Johnson found this 1912 Sanborn map of the Chicago American Giants’ home field, Schorling Park (formerly South Side Park, a.k.a. White Sox Park), located on W. 39th Street between Princeton and Wentworth avenues.

December 31, 2009

Anybody who knows better can tell me differently, but as far
as I know there is only a single microfilm edition of the Chicago
Defender.The original copy came
(I believe) from the University of Chicago.Unfortunately, while this is a decent run of the paper, it
is far from complete or pristine.Some entire issues are missing, or are represented by only a couple of
pages (such as July 14 and July 21, 1917).Since the Defender was in those days a weekly paper,
such gaps in the record can have a huge impact.

Then there are problems like this:a full, play-by-play account of an American Giants-Cuban
Stars game (played on June 10, 1917, one of the few games Dick Redding lost all
season) that was mangled in the University of Chicago’s original copy of the
paper.We’re left with only the
first four and a half innings.You
can just make out that Frank Warfield threw out Bill Francis to start the
bottom of the fifth; but what happened to Leroy Grant or Bruce Petway, who
batted after him?

Now, if another library—just one other library—has a run of
the actual, printed-on-paper Chicago Defender, we would stand a very good
chance of being able to fill in the gaps left by the standard microfilm edition—just
as I did with a couple of Cuban Stars games in 1921. But didanybody
else save the paper?It’s true
that probably not that many libraries would have subscribed to and saved
African-American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century; but
really, no place else, not even in New York City or Philadelphia, or even
somewhere else in Chicago?And
what about the Chicago Defender itself?What little I know about it suggests that black weeklies, due to cost
and space constraints, simply haven’t been able to keep complete archives,
especially from decades ago.

If anybody knows of a library or collection or archive that houses an
honest-to-goodness dead-tree run of the Defender (not just a few
scattered issues, but a stretch of years) from the first three or four decades
of the twentieth century, let me know.

October 11, 2009

Speaking of early 20th-century semiprofessional baseball in Chicago, Scott Simkus has posted photos of Gunthers Park, ca. 1904, and the Pyotts club in the early 1920s, courtesy of Tom Niesen. Tom is the great-great-grandson of William C. Niesen, who owned both clubs. These clubs were sometime members of the famous Chicago City League and frequent opponents of the Leland Giants and their successors the Chicago American Giants, as well as other African American clubs (not to mention the Cuban Stars).

September 26, 2009

Here’s an image I’m not sure I’ve seen before, of Schorling Park during an American Giants’ game in the mid-1920s. It can be found at the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery, and comes originally from John Taitt’s Souvenir of Negro Progress: Chicago, 1779-1925.

March 31, 2009

When Patrick Rock and I were searching for Negro Leaguers and Cuban ballplayers with World War I draft cards, one player we didn’t find at the time was José Méndez—even though he was in the United States in September, 1918, when a man of his age would have been required to register, citizen or not. At the time he was playing for the Chicago American Giants, having been brought in to replace the shortstop Bobby Williams, lost to the draft. (This was during the period when Méndez did very little pitching, and made his living as an infielder.)

I’ve continued research on the World War I cards over the past year, making occasional finds, but Méndez was always a low priority, as I assumed we pretty much knew everything there was to know about him. Then, a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I had seen several full names given for him:

So I went looking for Méndez in the World War I draft again, to see what name he used there. Of the 211 men named José Méndez who registered, only three lived in Chicago. Of them, two were listed as white (one a Mexican citizen); the other, the only black man named José Méndez to register for the draft in Chicago, was this one:

(click to enlarge)

So we have José del Valle Méndez, born January 2, 1885, whereas the official birthdate for the Hall of Famer José Méndez is March 19, 1887. He is listed as “negro” and a Cuban citizen. His occupation, cigar maker, is in fact the one tradition assigns Méndez (see González Echevarría, p. 131), and one that’s given for him on some early passenger lists to the United States (in 1910 traveling with the Stars of Cuba, for example). He is not listed as a professional ballplayer, but then neither were José Méndez’s teammates Pete Hill and Bruce Petway, who registered on the same day in the same city and who had been professionals for many years (both Hill and Petway listed themselves as civilian workers for the Army, as it happens). General Crowder’s “work or fight” order had classified sports as a non-essential occupation and led to the suspension of organized baseball on September 2. Independent and semipro baseball continued (Hill, Petway, and Méndez were all playing for the American Giants on days surrounding the September 12 registration day), but the players who had to register at that time often (though not always) put other occupations (as did some major league players, for example Burt Shotton, Hal Chase, and Jack Coombs).

José del Valle Méndez may have been a cigarmaker, but his employer looks very much like…Rube Foster. The microfilm from which the Ancestry.com scan was made, however, was flawed and streaked, so it could be “Robt. Foster,” or something else. The employer’s address is 3242 Vernon Ave., although the “Vernon” is obscured by another streak. Rube Foster’s address on that same date (September 12, 1918), as well as in the 1920 census, was 3242 Vernon Avenue.

(click to enlarge)

Returning to the Méndez card, it appears that in the box reserved for checking one’s “native born” status, he wrote “Cardenas, Cuba,” probably misunderstanding the purpose of the box. Cárdenas, of course, is where José Méndez was born.

So, what do you think? If my interpretation of the handwriting on the card is correct (it would be immensely useful to see the actual card), and this José Méndez worked for Rube Foster at 3242 Vernon Avenue, Chicago, then we have both a different birthdate and a different name for Méndez than any we have seen before—and in his own handwriting, which would grant it a particular authority.

UPDATE 8:06 p.m. I think I can add another strong point in favor of José del Valle Méndez being our man. On the card his nearest relative is one “Marcelina del Valle,” living on Factoria street in Havana. José Méndez’s mother, as evidenced by a number of passenger lists on which she was listed as his relative or contact in Cuba, was named Marcelina, and in 1917 at least she lived at No. 38 Factoria street in Havana. Her name was evidently Marcelina Méndez Lugones; she appears under both last names and also at least once as “M. Mendez Lugones.”